Upcoming Talk - Dr Amir-Homayoun Javadi at ASLTIP

From buzzing to talking; advances in effects of brain stimulation on aphasia

On Friday the 20th of May, 2022, our UTILISE collaborator, Dr Amir-Homayoun Javadi, will be giving a talk amongst other field-leaders at the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) conference 2022.

Claudia setting up tDCS brain stimulation on Amir.

Dr Amir-Homayoun Javadi is a senior lecturer at the University of Kent who has significant experience working with non-invasive brain stimulation methods. He, and our UTILISE MRI expert, Dr Jane Warren, are putting together a presentation that will discuss how stimulating the brain could help to rehabilitate language loss in post-stroke aphasia.

Claudia setting up tDCS brain stimulation on Jane.

Could brain stimulation help to “boost” the effects of therapy? Theories of neuroplasticity would argue that there is potential. Our brains are always changing, adapting and re-wiring as a result of our experiences. Even though stroke can cause irreperable damage to some parts of the brain, other, healthy brain areas can be encouraged to form new connections. Brain stimulation can excite the neurons and, potentially, help with this re-connection process.

Find out more in the talk. Everyone is welcome, so register here.

ASLTIP "Therapy Talks"

Professor Rosemary Varley at the ASLTIP “Therapy Talks” event (31/03/2022)

The UTILISE team are very grateful to the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) group for having us at their Therapy Talks event last week!

Professor Rosemary Varley, principal investigator of the UTILISE project, delivered a talk titled: “What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know””.

She gave a whistle-stop introduction to construction grammar, and spoke of how this theory informs our novel behavioural intervention targeting sentence rehabilitation in post-stroke aphasia.

Construction grammar suggests that we are able to store and access groups of words as single units, particularly if these phrases or sentences are “high frequency” (used often), for example: “I don’t know”.

This explains how someone with severe agrammatic expressive aphasia may be still be able to produce some grammatically correct utterances amidst otherwise syntactically disordered speech.

Using this idea of frequency, we are hoping to improve the accessibility and flexibility of these chunks in post-stroke aphasia.

“What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know””

Dr Anna Volkmer at the ASLTIP “Therapy Talks” event (31/03/2022)

Our UCL colleague, Dr Anna Volkmer, also delivered a terrific, and topical, presentation about Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), which is a language-led dementia, called: ““Will you still need me when I’m 65?” Dementia, language and speech and language therapy interventions”.

Anna raised the importance of taking a bespoke, person-centred approach to speech and language therapy.

For more of Anna’s work, see her recently published article: “Principles and philosophies for speech and language therapists working with people with primary progressive aphasia: an international expert consensus”.

Congratulations, Dr Vanessa Meitanis!

The lab is thrilled to announce the graduation of Dr Vanessa Meitanis.

The ceremony was held on the 10th of March 2022 and celebrated her thesis: “Noun and verb processing in aphasia and healthy aging: Online behavioural and ERP investigations”. Find out more here.

We are excited to see what Dr Meitanis continues to contribute to the field.

Dr Vanessa Meitanis graduating from the lab and dressed in her doctoral robes, alongside Professor Rosemary Varley.

Preparing UTILISE Stimuli

Our work with Therapy Box is coming along nicely. We’ve been examining prototypes of the new UTILISE therapy app and are thinking ahead to the launch of our small-scale study to test its feasibility.

Over the last couple of weeks, we have been creating some more sentences to add to our therapy tasks, so that users will have plenty of content to work through.

At Chandler House, we have a fantastic audio recording booth with a high-end microphone. Here, we can record high quality audios to use in our intervention. All three UTILISE therapy tasks use audio-taped sentences.

Pictured below are Rosemary, ready to lend her voice to the sentence constructions, and Claudia, listening closely and checking that the script programme is running smoothly.

Once all sentences are recorded, we comb through them carefully to check their quality to be sure we are left with clean, clear sound files.

The sentences we use have been carefully developed. We are practising constructions that are used frequently in day-to-day conversation. They are therefore highly functional.

Prof. Rosemary Varley, PI, ready to record some stimuli

Dr. Claudia Bruns, post-doc, running the script programme

We are looking forward to the next phase of our intervention development!

Upcoming Talk - Rosemary Varley at ASLTIP

What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know”.

On Thursday the 31st of March, 2022, our UTILISE project PI, Professor Rosemary Varley, will be giving a talk at the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) “Therapy Talks” event.

Professor Varley will give an overview of the usage-based Construction Grammar that informs our novel intervention for sentence processing in post-stroke aphasia, and discuss why it is a useful framework for speech and language therapy.

Construction Grammar argues that constructions are the fundamental building blocks of language. Constructions can be fixed, ‘concrete’ words or phrases that are used often and stored in memory as whole chunks, or more abstract ‘skeletons’ which leave room for different lexical items to fit into ‘open slots’.

We are very much looking forward to this opportunity to share our work with clinicians in the field. For more information on the other expert speakers invited to present that day, and to book a ticket, check out the event page here.

Meet our interns!

At UTILISE we are comitted to contributing to the scientific knowledge base. We also believe it is important to foster an environment where existing and aspiring researchers can learn, explore their areas of interest, and develop useful, transferrable skills for future projects that will further broaden the horizons of aphasia research. So, the team has expanded by two! We would love to introduce you to our interns; Ariel and Sonia.

Ziqian Xu - Ariel

I'm an intern in the UTILISE Project. I'm currently studying psychology and language sciences as an undergraduate at UCL.

I'm interested in the neural mechanisms of syntactic and semantic integration, visual attention, and number sense.

Sonia Mariotti

I recently graduated from the MSc Language Sciences (Neuroscience, Language and Communication) at UCL. I have a keen interest in acquired communication difficulties in older adults. I researched discourse production in aphasia under the supervision of Rosemary Varley. My project employed topic modelling to investigate the relationship between micro and macrolinguistic levels of language processing within a usage-based framework.

I previously studied Linguistics and Language Teaching in my BA at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy.

Marching on until March 2023

We are thrilled to announce that we are extending our UTILISE timeline!

After COVID-19 put our project on pause for more than a year, we were very excited to re-start in late 2021, at which point we had an expected end-date of October 2022.

However, we are now able to confirm that we will run until March 2023!

We are very grateful to our funder, The Stroke Association, for agreeing to extend our no-cost extension request.

This means we will be able to recruit more participants and collect more data.

Aphasia affects more than 350,000 people in the UK, so, it is incredibly important that we learn more about how to help people with aphasia to rebuild their language abilities. Lots of research has looked at rehabilitation on the single-word level. We are investigating sentence-level rehabilitation using a usage-based Construction Grammar framework (learn more here).

When it comes to therapy trials, the bigger the better! So, if you, or someone you know, might be interested in taking part, please contact Fern or Claudia by email or telephone to discuss what taking part would involve.

We are recruiting! What does our study involve?

We’re in full swing here on the UTILISE project!

Claudia and Fern can be found in Chandler House every day now, running therapy sessions and processing lots of data. Even though we’re nice and busy, we are on the look-out for new recruits!

The study is for people who have aphasia, following a stroke, who have difficulties understanding and producing sentences. If this sounds like you, or someone you know, then we need you!

Check out our aphasia-friendly video here for more information about what the study involves.

Our novel computer therapy program is designed to be high-dose, running 3 times a week over 4 weeks (12 sessions). The therapy phase has 3 tasks:

1. “Listen - Same or Different?”

2. “Listen - Be Quick!” and,

3. “Speak - Say Sentences”.

We are also looking for people to have MRI brain scans with us, so we can learn more about who may benefit from this therapy and whether the intervention can even change patterns of brain activity. Don’t worry, you do not have to have the brain scans to take part in the therapy.

If you are interested and would like to know more then check out our webpage for more information.

We would love to hear from you, so contact Fern or Claudia by email or telephone today.

Exciting things to come in 2022 - Therapy Box Collaboration

Happy New Year, 2022!

After receiving a Therapeutic Accelerator Scheme award, we are excited to share the news of our collaboration with Therapy Box. The Therapy Box team are working with us to develop our therapy software into an app, to improve user experience and enable remote therapy delivery. We hope that this will make UTILISE more widely available in the future, and we can’t wait to share more with you in the coming months. Read more about Therapy Box and their terrific work here.

We have started the year with a bang and are busy with participant testing / therapy sessions and brain scanning, as well as working with interns and supporting two MSc project students.

Read more about our project here.